Security threats have evolved significantly over the past years. Advanced hybrid threats, have been designed to attack systems on multiple fronts, sometimes searching for vulnerabilities until one is found. New threats also attempt to attack security technology itself.
Traditional consumer security software suites often included a plurality of various applications such as an anti-virus application, a firewall application, etc. These applications existed in such software suites as a simple bundle. In other words, each application secures a particular domain in a vacuum. As such, the anti-virus application may do a stringent scan, but the firewall application may not take any action at all, and so on.
All security applications perform actions. Some of these actions are trivial and some are more sophisticated. More importantly, other security applications may benefit from being informed as to when these actions occur. For example, when an anti-virus application detects and cleans a virus, it may be beneficial for other installed security applications to respond in kind.
Prior Art FIG. 1 illustrates one exemplary prior art system 10 where one application may interact with another. As shown, a first application 12 and a second application 14 are included in an application suite 16. In such prior art system 10, the first application 12 is equipped with a specific command 15 (i.e. execute operation X, etc.) that may be directly transmitted to the second application 14 to prompt a response from the second application 14.
Unfortunately, such prior art system 10 is overly simplistic and ineffective in enabling communications across a larger number of applications. There is simply no current technique of accomplishing effective cross-application communication. There is thus a need for an effective technique of granting security applications the ability to communicate with each other.